Leda is a middle-aged divorcee devoted to her work as an English teacher and to her two children. When her daughters leave home to be with their father in Canada, Leda anticipates a period of loneliness and longing. Instead, slightly embarrassed by the sensation, she feels liberated, as if her life has become lighter, easier. She decides to take a holiday by the sea, in a small coastal town in Greece. But after a few days of calm and quiet, things take a menacing turn. Leda encounters a family...

Francesca, an Italian-American writer who lives in New York and must return to Rome to retrieve her aging mother.

The film serves as Garrone's English-language debut and will interweave three separate story strands bookended by brief bits in which Italians Alba Rohrwacher and Massimo Ceccherini will play a street circus family. In one tale Salma Hayek will play a jealous queen who forfeits her husband's life. In another, Vincent Cassel plays a king whose passion is stoked by two mysterious sisters.

Melissa lives with her mother and her grandmother in Sicily. She has a close relationship with her grandmother, a heavy smoker, who seems to be the only person in the world who understands Melissa. Melissa's father lives in another country. One day Melissa and her friend go to a party at a school friend's home. While there, Melissa meets Daniele, a boy from the school, and has her first sexual experience. The experience is far from being what Melissa always has dreamed it would be, because...

Over two decades ago, Emma left Russia to follow Tancredi Recchi, the man who had proposed to her. Now a member of a powerful industrial Milanese family, she is the respected mother of three. But Emma, although not unhappy, feels confusedly unfulfilled. One day Antonio, a talented chef and her son's friend and partner, makes her senses kindle. It does not take long before she embarks on a passionate affair with the sensuous young man.

One day at a colleague's going away party, Anna meets Domenico, a virile, slightly older chap who's married with two small kids. Passion's flames are rapidly kindled and result in steamy encounters.